An update about the Domancic Method

Zoran Hochstatter, Zdenko Domancic's authorized representative in the West, has been quite busy in the three years since I first learned the method from him. He has taught students in the U.S., in London, England, and in Toronto, Canada. He has authorized a level-3 student in Toronto and another in London to hold Domancic clinics. He has also written a book entitled Three Chairs about the method and is now working with Dr. Craig Oster, an 18-year ALS survivor and supporter of alternative healing, who has a website called The Healers that is a veritable who-is-who of the future of healing.

This is what Dr. Oster had to say about his experience with the Domancic Method:

The world needs to know that IT IS ABSOLUTELY NONSENSE & FALSEHOOD TO CLAIM THAT PEOPLE DIAGNOSED WITH ALS DIAGNOSIS MAY NOT HAVE REMARKABLE IMPROVEMENTS!

My work with Zoran this week using the Domancic Method of Bioenergy Therapy has been remarkable, with improved speech and my breathing best over the last 3 1/2 years.

"Has cancer been misunderstood?"

I just ran across a brilliant article entitled "Has Cancer Been Completely Misunderstood?" It cites a relatively recent hypothesis which postulates that cancer cells are not random genetic mutations, but evolutionary throwbacks to a time when cells were undifferentiated and when the only available survival response for a colony of cells was unchecked growth. According to the researchers,

Cancer is not a random bunch of selfish rogue cells behaving badly, but a highly-efficient pre-programmed response to stress, honed by a long period of evolution.

In short, if you stress the human organism sufficiently, you will awaken primal genetic programming that causes cancer to develop in individual cells as a survival adaptation. This programming developed about a billion years ago, at a time when the earth was experiencing much harsher environmental conditions than we have today, so these cells can survive in low-oxygen environments and ultimately thumb their noses at anything medicine can throw at them in the way of chemotherapy or radiation.

This new hypothesis completely reverses the current view of cancer. Rather than being an unhealthy occurrence within a healthy body, it is an archaic survival response to conditions that threaten the body, i.e., an effort to reestablish health. The author of the article concludes

we need to shift our thinking away from the view that cancer is something unnatural that happens to us, to one where we see that cancer is something natural our body does to survive unnatural conditions. Change and improve those conditions, and you do more to change cancer than [by] attacking it as if you were fighting a war against an enemy.

As my summary is quite sketchy, I heartily recommend reading the article in full.

What cats teach us about energy healing

It has now happened twice. The first time I just thought it was strange. The second time I began to ponder what it meant.

Some years ago I was visiting my hairdresser and she asked me to treat her cat. The poor cat was suffering from kidney failure. It was all skin and bones, its fur dull, scraggly and matted. It looked like one very sick pussycat.

I treated the cat on the couch, with my hairdresser sitting on the other side. Both of us watched, dumbfounded, as during the treatment the cat's fur began to change, to puff out, to grow smooth and shiny, and gradually return to "normal".

When the cat had enough, it jumped off the couch (something it hadn't been able to do) and walked away.

The story didn't have a happy ending, because the very next day the cat was euthanized. The appointment had already been made, the owners didn't want the cat to suffer, they didn't really believe in "energy healing", and they didn't want to wait.

I filed the experience away for further reference, and the reference came last week, when I was asked to treat another cat in kidney failure.

I told the owners about the my experience with the previous cat and said that one of the effects might be that the fur would puff out and look normal again. It began to happen during the treatment, but not as dramatically as before. The cat slept for the rest of the day and then the day following was unable to walk. The owners had the vet on emergency standby but were willing to wait 48 hours.

At last report the cat seemed to be better and was lying in the sun, her fur sleek and soft and shiny, with a cowlick that had not been there before. (Postscript April 21: also, ever since the treatment, she has not been peeing blood, which I would consider to be a good sign.)

Some conclusions

Cats don't do "placebo effect". And fur puffing out is a clear sign of something physical going on.

Everyone assumes that a sick animal's fur is matted because it has stopped grooming itself. But neither one of these cats did a single lick of grooming during its treatment. The difference between healthy sleek fur and sickly matted fur seems to be, at least to some extent, energetic. To me this would seem to constitute some kind of proof that energy healing definitely does something.

Some questions about publicizing the Bengston Method

I just ran across an FAQ posted by Equilibrium Energy concerning the Bengston Method and I could not help but notice this paragraph:

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Bengston and the therapists he has trained successfully treated people with many types of cancer—bone, pancreatic, breast, brain, rectal, lymphatic, stomach, leukemia—as well as other diseases, all using this hands-on technique that is painless, noninvasive and has no unpleasant side effects. To Dr. Bengston’s knowledge, no person he has healed ever experienced a recurrence.

The reason I noticed it is because it's very close to a paragraph in the introduction to Bill Bengston's book The Energy Cure (also published as Chasing the Cure in Canada and Heilen aus dem Nichts in Germany) which reads

Over the past 30 years I’ve cured bone cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, rectal cancer, lymphatic cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia, all using hands-on techniques which are painless, noninvasive and have no unpleasant side effects. To my knowledge, no person I’ve healed has ever experienced a reoccurrence.

What has been added is the clear suggestion that the therapists Dr. Bengston has trained over the past three decades have been as successful as he is at treating these deadly cancers. [Note May 11th: I have now been advised in a comment that Dr. Bengston himself says this claim represents a misunderstanding of his work and is not accurate.]

I cannot comment on Dr. Bengston's successes, but I can certainly comment on the experiences of at least some of his therapists, since I and my colleagues have been among their number after six Toronto workshops in 2007 and 2008.

As I have pointed out several times in this blog, our experiences with the Bengston Method did not include successful cures of documented cancers. We have palliated, ameliorated, arguably extended life spans, but we did not cure any fully documented cancers. Does that translate into "successful treatment"? Coming to Toronto in 2007 Dr. Bengston never claimed that he has ever successfully taught anyone to cure cancer in humans. He only claimed that the skeptical students he trained for his experiments went on to cure transplanted breast cancer in mice (and even then he added that he could not be sure that it was his method that was responsible for the cures). I have not heard him claim otherwise in any of the interviews that I've listened to since then—but maybe I missed something.

Here is what he said about teaching healing in a talk he gave to his colleagues at the Society of Scientific Exploration. The relevant bit begins at 1 min. 9 secs.



I wish and hope for the sake of cancer sufferers everywhere that the authors of this FAQ are encountering greater success than we have in obtaining fully documented cancer cures using the Bengston Method—and given Sheldrake's morphic field theory ("the bigger the field, the bigger the effect") it could even be possible. But in publicizing the method I wish they would give us their own clinical experience and their own proof, limiting claims to what they can show to be true now. I'd be more than impressed if I were to read that in the past two years they've been able to cure X, Y, Z cancers and have the documentation to prove it. There is no need to go back 35 years.

Most people have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around the idea that Dr. Bengston has been curing the most terrifying cancers humanity has seen for 30-plus years. It is doubtful that raising the credibility bar by suggesting that his students have been doing likewise will help the cause. Even I'm left scratching my head wondering where this came from.

A cautionary tale

In the summer of 2008 we treated a stage-4 pancreatic cancer patient who we were told was on his deathbed. After we began treating him he miraculously rallied and was eventually discharged to go home. He stopped taking morphine five days after his first treatment. His jaundice reversed. He was able to get out of bed, walk to the park, go shopping, spend weekends at the cottage. He started thinking that he might even go back to work. Six weeks after we began treating him his blood values were nearly normal, but in the four weeks after that he developed septicemia and then suddenly died.

A few months later I found some promotional material on the internet relating to two workshops Dr. Bengston held that fall. In it the promoter excitedly proclaimed that our deceased patient was alive and well and back at work, fully recovered from his stage-4 pancreatic cancer. This claim was made a mere three weeks after our patient had passed away.

I don't believe that the person who wrote the promotional material meant to deceive anyone. I believe it was a case of "broken telephone" syndrome—someone acting on outdated information, not bothering to check with the source. In this way all information is suspect, except information that one is able to verify. I can't help but wonder whether our pancreatic cancer patient forms part of the 35 years of successes that this FAQ alludes to.

So please feel free to ask many, many questions and do not rest with the answer unless you've assured yourself that the person you are talking to is not basing their evidence on hearsay. And don't necessarily accept the answer "because Dr. Bengston says so" on face value either, because it could be that he is being misquoted. Inadvertently, of course.

"Appropriating" the teacher's experience

I know first hand the dangers of appropriating one's teacher's experiences and treating them as one's own. This is commonplace in energy healing. Many people assume that because a Richard Bartlett, a Bill Bengston, or an Eric Pearl can move mountains, taking a few workshops with them will enable anyone to do likewise. Yes, a few people can. Many cannot. So when I read in this FAQ that Dr. Bengston recommends eight treatments spaced one week apart, I ask whether that means that in the authors' experience eight treatments spaced one week apart are sufficient to cure particular cancers. In Dr. Bengston's talks "dose response" still sounds like an open question and in our experience different patients had different treatment requirements (we could treat a small tumour once a week, but when we switched a pancreatic cancer patient from five treatments a week to two or three, it shifted the equilibrium in favour of the cancer and his condition worsened). Or when I read that aggressive cancers respond quickly I have to ask whether that is also the authors' experience or they are merely repeating what Dr. Bengston says in his seminars. Have they tried and succeeded curing leukemia, brain and pancreatic cancer in a handful of treatments? The same goes for how tumours react and how the method works. I don't believe Dr. Bengston himself claims to know for certain how exactly what he does works—as any good scientist he only postulates and then tests hypotheses. I've never heard him say that the "energy hyper-cycles tumours out of the body"—he even questions whether what does the healing is in fact "energy".

I'd be curious to know the answers to these questions.

Postscript

A friend to whom I showed this post said that she would be hesitant to add to the morphic field of doubt concerning energy healing but thought that the questions I raise are reasonable. I try to walk a fine line in this blog between being enthusiastic and supportive of energy healing but also being level-headed about it. I probably more often than not fall over on the side of enthusiasm. And while I am enthusiastic about the future prospects of some of the methods I learned, including the Bengston Method, I would be leery about promoting them to cancer patients and care-givers as reliable cures. I don't think we are there yet. But I could be wrong.

The new "new kid on the block" part 2: Russian Organ Regeneration

I've now had the opportunity to attend two workshops on this somewhat awkwardly named method. It is called "organ regeneration" because that is precisely what the founders claim it can do: regrow organs. In a series of videos on Youtube entitled "Light of Eternity" people speak of regrowing organs: wombs, gall bladders, missing bits of lung, new teeth.

Another name for the method is "Russian New Knowledge". It is based on the work of three Russian healers, Grigori Grabovoi, Arcady Petrov, and Igor Arapjev. When I first encountered the method, I saw it as a kind of targeted prayer, and I wondered if it was similar to what Dr. Issam Nemeh did when he healed people.

The main premise of Russian Organ Regeneration is that there is a state of divine perfection from which one deviates in illness and to which it is possible to return. The name for this state of perfection is "the Creator's norm". The second premise is that the healing of anyone benefits all of Creation, as it helps return Creation to the norm of perfection that the Creator intended. The third premise is that we are co-creators with the Creator, and therefore have a say in how things unfold.

The method works in part by going back to the time before the illness started, to the first event which caused one to deviate from the Creator's norm. From that point in time a different path is chosen, the path that leads one back to the state of health that is the Creator's norm. This is similar to some Hawaiian huna practices. In huna if you injure yourself you replay the scenario in your mind in a way that avoids the injury altogether. The body can then be tricked into behaving as if the injury never happened. But this requires a certain kind of concentration that most people are not able to produce. Some of the practices of Russian Organ Regeneration, meditations developed by Grigori Grabovoi, focus on developing this level of concentration.

Russian Organ Regeneration shares with Matrix Energetics the belief that we are essentially made of light and information. Information can be manipulated to create changes in the physical body. To me the most helpful part of the second workshop -- a true "aha" moment -- was the understanding that change percolates down from the information level through the energetic level to the somatic (the body). It is easy to create change on the information level, but it takes energy and focus to bring it down into the body. Elsewhere I've discussed the difference between energy healing and informational healing. Energy healing supports the physical body and can speed up healing -- but informational healing can be instantaneous. This is the level at which spontaneous remissions happen.

According to Grigori Grabovoi information can be manipulated through vibration. Everything has vibration: light, sound, colour, numbers. Grabovoi has devised a "number pharmacy" in which each condition is paired with a number that corrects its vibration. The "number pharmacy" and the concentration exercises Grabovoi teaches to help people develop focus are both available on Amazon.

This method should resonate with those who have deep spiritual grounding and are comfortable with prayer and the idea of a benevolent Creator. I personally would not rule out the notion of organ regeneration just because it sounds implausible. The Russians are well ahead of the west in the science of what we call the paranormal. I recommend reading Claude Swanson's huge tome on the subject, Life Force: The Scientific Basis, also available through Amazon.

Audio interview with Anita Moorjani and Wayne Dyer on the Aware Show

And the good stuff keeps coming ... Here is a link to an interview with Anita Moorjani and Wayne Dyer on the Aware Show.

The stuff needs to be shouted from the rooftops. About 20 minutes into the interview Anita explains how she can still return to the bliss state she experienced during her NDE:

It's actually the opposite of focusing or choosing ... it's almost like a release, like a letting go, like a surrender ... so there is no goal or anything ... it's like any sense of wanting to attain anything has to be released. This is the dichotomy: even the desire to attain that state has to be released, so it's literally a state of total release and total surrender, so there is no attachment to anything physical, any outcome or even a physical body ... Once I do that ... it feels as though I have access to the infinity, to the higher, to the unlimited, to the potential, to the ambiguity. The minute you put limitations on it, any kind of limitation, even the limitation of "this is the state I want", you are limiting the possibility. It really means opening yourself up to absolutely anything ... with no expectations, and you become available to everything, absolutely everything.

At about the 48 minute mark Wayne and Anita discuss the role of fear in cancer. Anita points out that we have been socialized to fear cancer when in fact cancer is a symptom, like a scab over a wound. She suggests everything we now do just treats the symptoms and no one looks at what really causes cancer. She believes the real cause is fear, that when fear becomes deeply ingrained on a cellular level it is physically expressed as cancer. Cancer awareness campaigns and the focus on early detection only exacerbate this fear (I would comment that cancer treatment exacerbates it even more). The solution (from Wayne): discover the changeless, deathless part of you, remind yourself that you are not your body, but an infinite spiritual being having a human experience. Anita's solution: find your joy and live from your passion. Your job here is not to please others but to live from your own authenticity. Amen to that.

Their advice ultimately boils down to developing absolute trust in a benevolent universe in the face of all fear and all apparent evidence to the contrary, which would seem to me a difficult task for cancer patients -- but a very necessary one.

To those who scoff, I would suggest perusing the research of Dr. Alastair Cunningham on long-term cancer survivors in his Healing Journey Program, which corroborates what Anita suggests here. I would also suggest that the testimony of someone who came back from the brink of death, and shortly afterwards found herself mysteriously cured of terminal stage-4 cancer, is of far greater worth to me than the testimony of a dozen oncology experts.

Censored by the mainstream

Yesterday I noticed a few hits on my blog from a discussion group at lymphoma.com. Out of curiosity I clicked on the link and found that someone had posted a link to my post "Open Letter to Oncologists" and asked "What do you think?" Another member named Anjou promptly replied "sounds like a duck--quack quack".

I responded to this very politely, suggesting that the poster was being prematurely dismissive. A discussion ensued, which the poster began by adding "squawks like a duck too". She then accused me of marketing. I had no intention of marketing; I only joined the discussion because of her attitude. In the end I provided them with a list of links which had nothing to do with this blog (or me marketing it), but with providing information that the readers of lymphoma.com could have benefited from -- links to Anita Moorjani's book Dying to be me, Leigh Fortson's book Embrace, Release, Heal, Dr. Bengston's SSE talks on Youtube, and Dr. Claude Swanson's Youtube interview. Anita Moorjani and Leigh Fortson are both cancer survivors, Anita in particular a lymphoma survivor. One might think that the participants of a discussion group on lymphoma might be interested in what they had to say.

All of this was deleted by the Moderators, because God forbid that the readers of lymphoma.com should find out about anything other than the standard medical treatments. And Anjou thanked them. And then I received the following message from lymphoma.com:

You have been banned for the following reason: Insulting behavior - posting outside forum rules.
Date the ban will be lifted: Never